Season Of The Harvest (Harvest Trilogy, Book 1) (62 page)

Jack coughed, then said, “I don’t
think so. Sorry, but you’re going to join the
dinosaurs.”

“Salvation is right here, Jack,” it
said softly, standing over him and holding out the box. “All I need
is the code to the doors. And you will live.”

“You’re right about that, you
bitch!”

The creature whirled around to find
Naomi standing only a few paces behind it, a Taser in her hands,
pointed at her doppelganger’s chest.

The harvester tried to leap to the
side, but Naomi was ready: she fired, and the Taser probes hit the
creature in the left breast. The harvester convulsed and stiffened
in mid-air, then splashed to the floor. The mask of Naomi’s face
quickly dissolved into a mottled blob of flesh.

The yellow box fell from its hand
and Naomi dove after it, snatching it out of the deepening pool of
fuel. Then she pulled a large syringe from her vest and stabbed the
harvester with it. Formaldehyde to paralyze it, Jack
knew.

“Naomi,” he gasped as the venom’s
fire entered his chest. He tried to say something more, but the
paralysis had reached his throat. All he could do now was twitch
his left arm and leg. The pain was unbearable, as if he’d been cast
into an open fire.

“Hang on, Jack,” Naomi told him.
“Don’t you leave me, damn you!”

“Come on!” Jack saw Richards
kneeling down on his other side. “We’ve got to get out of here!
Then you can stick him with that!”

“But–”

“Now!” Without another word,
Richards picked up Jack in a fireman’s carry and began to pound
down the long tunnel toward the antenna complex, with Naomi running
alongside.

After what seemed like an eternity,
Richards stumbled into the storage silo, gasping for breath as he
roughly set Jack down on the floor.

Behind them, Renee closed the blast
door. No matter what happened now, at least the harvester wouldn’t
be able to escape.

“Jesus,” Naomi whispered.
“Jack.”

He stared upward, unblinking. His
body was totally paralyzed now, and Naomi would have thought he was
dead except for the rapid but shallow rise and fall of his chest as
he fought to breathe. Peaceful as he appeared, she knew that he was
still experiencing excruciating pain.

Her only relief was that Alexander
and Koshka had finally turned up: like the other cats, they had
been drawn to the harvester as soon as it had escaped. Unlike the
others, however, they had survived the battle with the creature
with nothing more than a few lacerations. After the survivors had
reached the storage silo, someone had crammed them into a survival
suit. They were complaining unhappily, but were alive and would be
kept safe on the surface.

Naomi opened the yellow case and
withdrew the antivenin injector. “Please, God,” she whispered, “let
this work.” Her face set with grim determination, she plunged the
short needle into Jack’s jugular vein and triggered it.

The result was instantaneous. Jack
went into frenzied convulsions. Naomi and Renee, then Richards,
fought to hold him down as his muscles rebelled.

Without warning,
he began to scream. Naomi’s soul turned to ash at the sound until
she understood that they were screams of pain.
He must be coming out of the paralysis
, she prayed, wanting to burst into tears at the agony he
must have been in.

The convulsions suddenly began to
taper off, as did the screams. Naomi looked at Jack’s face and was
rewarded with the sight of him looking back.

“Naomi...” he finally managed,
shakily raising a hand toward her face.

She took hold of it and kissed it,
crying with relief.

“Come on,” Richards said, “we’ve got
to get out of here before the fuel lights off.” He looked at the
closed blast door behind them. It was one of the lighter doors,
only a few inches thick. “I don’t know if this door will take the
stress. If it can’t, we sure don’t want to be in here when it
blows.”

He handed them some environmental
suits. Naomi and Renee managed to get Jack into one, then got into
their own.

Naomi kissed Jack, then told him,
“You’re going to be okay.” Then she closed the mask, sealing Jack
in his suit.

After sealing her own, she told
Richards, “Let’s go see what hell looks like.”

Richards grunted as he shepherded
the FBI agents aboard the big elevator. They were going up first to
check on the conditions before bringing up the EDS personnel. “I
think we’ve already been there and done that,” he
muttered.

The surface, not surprisingly, was a
charred wasteland. There was still a tremendous amount of smoke and
steam drifting up from the ground that had been melted into glass.
Everything, as far as they could see, was scorched and
black.

It was still hot, but not nearly as
bad as Naomi had expected: the fireball had created its own weather
system, and cooler air had rushed into the void as the mushroom
cloud had risen higher. The roiling maelstrom had taken in moisture
from a storm front moving in from seaward, and a warm rain had
begun to fall, the black rain that Naomi had remembered reading
about after the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The
ground was still hot enough to be uncomfortable through the thick
soles of the environmental suits, and the first drops of rain
sizzled when they hit the smoldering ground. But soon there was a
light but steady drizzle that partly cooled the earth beneath their
feet.

It was a sobering emergence from one
surreal universe into another, but Naomi didn’t care. She was
alive. And so was Jack. She had no idea what their future might be,
or if they had one together, but now they at least had a chance to
find out. As did the rest of the human race.

She looked down at Jack, whose hand
clung weakly to hers as two FBI agents bore him out on a stretcher
they had pulled from the survival stores. She smiled behind her
mask, and could tell from the look in his eyes that he was smiling
back.

“Naomi,” Richards called. “Look.” He
pointed to a group of black specks on the horizon that quickly
resolved into helicopters.

“Two Apache gunships and thirteen
Blackhawks,” he said. “I guess the gig’s finally up.”

***

The harvester awoke to find that it
was alone. The last of its kind that lived, it did not cry in rage
or fear as it arose from the sea of stinking diesel
fuel.

It stood there, contemplating its
long life and the failure of the great plan as the fuel finally
reached one of the open relays in the power switches and
ignited.

***

Naomi and the others flinched when a
sudden rumble made the earth shiver beneath their feet.

“The fuel must’ve finally gone off,”
Renee noted blandly.

The Blackhawks settled all around
them while the Apaches orbited overhead, their guns aimed at the
group of survivors gathered around the antenna silo
doors.

A soldier, dressed in full
protective gear, hopped out of the nearest Blackhawk. He was
quickly joined by three more men who took up positions on either
side and behind him.

Naomi stepped forward to meet the
soldier in the center, whom she assumed would be the senior
officer.

“I’m Naomi Perrault,” she said, her
voice muffled through the mask. “We’re unarmed.”

“That’s smart,” the other man said
simply. “I don’t want the President kicking my ass because we had
to shoot any of you.” Surprising Naomi, he held out his hand, and
she took it. “I’m General Ryan Macaulay from Beale Air Force Base.
I’ve got direct orders from the President of the United States to
get you and your people to safety and to secure this
area.”

“Orders from President Curtis?” she
blurted.

“That’s right,” Macaulay said. “You
all are heroes, he told me. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get
you and your folks out of here.”

Naomi nodded numbly, having a hard
time coming to grips with this unexpected turn of
events.

She watched as Macaulay turned and
gave some orders to one of his escorts, who she noticed was
carrying a radio. The man relayed the general’s instructions, and a
moment later troops spilled from the other Blackhawks. Most moved
quickly to form a cordon around the base’s scorched perimeter,
while others, including a dozen medics, began to help her people
into the now-empty helicopters.

“We’ll take you back to Beale and
get you cleaned up,” Macaulay told her as a pair of corpsmen gently
carried Jack and put him in one of the Blackhawks. Someone handed
her what looked like an empty environment suit, but in fact
contained a pair of extremely unhappy cats. Unable to keep from
smiling, she put them aboard the Blackhawk with Jack.

“Let go of me, Godzilla!” she heard
Renee cry as she broke away from a soldier who had been trying to
get her aboard one of the other Blackhawks. She trotted over to
their helicopter, with Richards right behind her.

“I’m riding first class with you
guys,” she announced as she climbed into the passenger compartment,
sitting down next to Jack and taking one of his hands.

“I have to keep an eye on her,”
Richards grated as he climbed aboard, too.

Naomi shook her head and smiled.
“Thanks, general,” she said, shaking the man’s hand
again.

“I’ll see you back at Beale,”
Macaulay told her.

With that, Naomi climbed into the
waiting helicopter. Collapsing into her seat, exhausted, she took
Jack’s other hand in hers, and held onto the suit containing the
squirming cats with her free hand as the Blackhawk lifted
off.

EPILOGUE

Jack’s eyes snapped open at the
sound of someone knocking at the door. He’d fallen asleep on the
couch next to Naomi, who had been reading.

They were in the Gold Country Inn,
which served as the visitor quarters and temporary living facility
for Beale Air Force Base. The inn had been cleared out prior to
their arrival, and all the EDS base survivors had been quartered
there after going through a thorough decontamination procedure. The
entire building was cordoned off by a small army of military
police, and Jack had been happy to note that the guns were pointed
out, not in. Macaulay had made it clear that they weren’t
prisoners, but wanted them to stay put for their own safety until
“things got sorted out.”

“I’ll get it,” Jack said. He was
still feeling the effects of the harvester’s venom, but the
antivenin had worked wonders. The medics had been forced to give
him morphine for a while to deal with the pain, which diminished
more slowly than the paralysis. But the pain was gone now, and
aside from a persistent tingling in his right side and left hand,
plus the pain from the two stab wounds from the stinger, he felt
more or less back to normal.

Crossing the room in a few strides,
followed by Alexander and Koshka, who were always curious about
visitors, Jack opened the door.

“Special Agent Jack Dawson, I
presume,” President Norman Curtis said.

Jack froze, unable to speak. He felt
Naomi come up beside him, her hand on his arm. The last harvester
they’d killed had claimed that there were no more, but Jack wasn’t
taking any chances. Not now. And even if the man standing in front
of them wasn’t a harvester, he was a known collaborator.

Naomi looked down at the cats, who
showed no more than their usual feline curiosity at anything from a
human being to an empty cardboard box.

“It’s just me,”
Curtis said, glancing curiously at the cats. “The protective detail
is outside...and there aren’t any of
them
, those things, the harvesters,
with me. Not anymore.”

Jack peered down the hallway both
ways. It was deserted.

“I made the protective detail wait
outside,” Curtis said. “Can we talk?”

Still unsure, Jack nodded and
gestured for the President to come in. The three of them took seats
around the suite’s small dinette table.

Neither Jack, nor Naomi said
anything. They stared at the President in silence.

“Very few people know this,” Curtis
began, turning from his silent hosts to stare out the window, “but
my daughter had inoperable brain cancer some years ago. It came as
an utter and completely bitter surprise. It’s one thing to lose
someone you truly love. A wife or husband, sister or father. It’s
something else entirely to lose a child, especially the only one we
could ever have. I prayed for a miracle, and would have gladly sold
my soul to save her.” He turned to look at them. “That’s when Dr.
Rachel Kempf came to me, offering my daughter a chance to live
using an experimental gene therapy program.”

“And you bought into it,” Naomi
accused, not bothering to mask her disgust.

“You’re damn right I did,” he told
her bluntly. “For all I knew back then, which was before you were
hired by New Horizons, Kempf was legitimate. And even if she’d been
a carnival fraud I would’ve given her a chance to save my
daughter’s life.” His voice lowered slightly. “It was only after
the treatment succeeded, wiping out my daughter’s cancer and asking
nothing in return, that Kempf showed me that she wasn’t any
ordinary geneticist. But the form she revealed wasn’t her true one,
I know now. Nor did she tell us the truth about ‘The Secret,’ as we
called their plan, or at least the version they revealed to us. As
you well know, they lied, and those of us who were in on The Secret
were taken for a ride. Used.”